We investigate Monte Carlo simulation strategies for determining the effective ("depletion") potential between a pair of hard spheres immersed in a dense sea of much smaller hard spheres. Two routes to the depletion potential are considered. The first is based on estimates of the insertion probability of one big sphere in the presence of the other; we describe and compare three such methods. Th...

With the increasing number of digital maps and other geo-referenced data that are available over the Internet, there is a growing need for methods to preview the content of such data sources, and to evaluate their relevance with respect to complex spatial and thematic search criteria. Analogous to the digital indices for full-text searches on text documents, we introduce highly condensed, machi...

YouTube, with millions of content creators, has become the preferred destination for watching videos online. Through the Partner program, YouTube allows content creators to monetize their popular videos. Of significant importance for content creators is which meta-level features (e.g. title, tag, thumbnail) are most sensitive for promoting video popularity. The popularity of videos also depends...

An important problem in web archiving is understanding and presenting how a single page changes over time. This is not only important for researchers, but can also be useful in educating the general public about the temporal and dynamic nature of the web. A common method for presenting webpage change is to display a set of thumbnails of the mementos, or archived pages. Although this can be a us...

1 The effects of density on the vital rates, growth form and population size structure of the invasive seaweed Sargassum muticum (Yendo) Fensholt were evaluated experimentally. 2 The initial difference in plant number between the highest and the lowest density (200 and 6400 plants m − 2 ) was considerably reduced by the end of the experiment. Surprisingly, this was mostly due to numbers increas...

BACKGROUND Lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration (LDD) frequently occurs in athletes. Associations between LDD and trunk muscles still remain unclear. PURPOSE This study examined whether there is an association between the prevalence of LDD and the symmetry and size of the cross-sectional areas (CSAs) of the trunk muscles in combat sports athletes. METHODS Participants in this study were ...

Acute exacerbation (AE) of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) results in poor survival. The objective of the present study was to elucidate the impact of asymmetrical ground-glass opacity (GGO) and/or consolidation on outcomes in patients with AE-IPF. The cases of 59 consecutive patients with AE-IPF were retrospectively reviewed. High-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) at diagnosis of an AE...

Cochlear implantation in children with an asymmetrical hearing loss is now becoming more recognized as an appropriate and beneficial treatment option. In our programme, we have been implanting children with asymmetrical hearing loss since 2008. Asymmetrical hearing loss is defined as hearing loss when one ear meets criteria for cochlear implantation and the other ear has better hearing and rece...

Nonlinear Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are investigated for visual sex classification with low resolution "thumbnail" faces (21by-12 pixels) processed from 1,755 images from the FE RET face database. The performance of SVMs is shown to be superior to traditional pattern classifiers (Linear, Quadratic, Fisher Linear Discriminant, Nearest-Neighbor) as well as more modern techniques such as Radi...